Twitter Just Suspended A Ton Of Accounts Known For Stealing Tweets

@Dory, @GirlPosts, @SoDamnTrue, Girl Code/@reiatabie, Common White Girl/@commonwhitegiri, @teenagernotes, @finah, @holyfag, along with also @memeprovider were among the accounts of which got swept up inside purge.

Many of these accounts were hugely well-liked, with hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers.

In addition to stealing people’s tweets without credit, some of these accounts are known as “tweetdeckers” due to their practice of teaming up in exclusive Tweetdeck groups along with also mass-retweeting one another’s — along with also paying customers’ — tweets into forced virality.

A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment on individual accounts, although BuzzFeed News understands the accounts were suspended for violating Twitter’s spam policy.

Tweetdecking, as of which’s called, is actually an explicit violation of Twitter’s spam policy, which does not allow users to “sell, purchase, or attempt to artificially inflate account interactions.”

Still, Twitter has previously struggled to crack down on these accounts.

After a BuzzFeed News story uncovered the practice of tweetdecking in January, Twitter announced brand-new spam-fighting improvements to Tweetdeck, including removing the ability to simultaneously retweet a tweet across multiple accounts.

“Tweetdecking is actually over. Our follower gains are gonna diminish,” Andrew Guerrero, a 23-year-old tweetdecker in brand-new Mexico, told BuzzFeed News after Twitter announced the improvements in February. (Guerrero asked of which his account name not be disclosed since of which could get him suspended.)

Nevertheless, tweetdecking has persisted. No longer able to mass-retweet with just one click in Tweetdeck, many deckers have gone analog, manually DM’ing requests for a “RT 4 RT.”

This kind of certainly isn’t once tweetdeckers have been suspended, along with also of which’s unlikely to be the last. However, Friday’s mass suspensions were unprecedented in their scope; some of the suspended accounts, including @Dory along with also @GirlPosts, had amassed millions of followers.

Temporary suspensions are par for the course for deckers, along with also most get right back inside tweet-stealing game — sometimes on the same account after getting reinstated, along with also sometimes on entirely brand-new accounts.

According to Twitter’s rules, violating the spam policy is actually grounds for permanent suspension. (As is actually creating a brand-new account to evade a permanent suspension.)

So, will these suspensions be permanent, or will these deckers return to deck again? Only time will tell — although until then, the “#TweetdeckIsOverParty” goes on.